Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort.
“We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”?
What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.
For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
I am not defending any of this fuckwits, but I don't know that it's much different than any organized religion. All of them are stories that get retold over and over until people accept them on faith. I can envision a world where our stories (movies, books) where history is lost of their creation, become facts. "Of course there was Jedi, we've just forgotten…"
Now, they're all fuckwits, but it's not outside the realm of thought.
A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae)", not "Sith who abstain from animal products".
(A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page.
It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1]
Apparently, being a Sith meant to Ziz that you should do whatever is in your power and desire to do, without other constraints. If you're "fundamentally good" (a thing she believes in), then what you end up doing will be a kind of maximization of good.
Of course, this is trite pulp nonsense, high-school nerd level philosophy at best.
Look up Joshua Citarella’s coverage of the ideological milieus that Generation Z cultivated during COVID on platforms like Discord.
And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
We seem to live in a post-ironic moment. Look no further than the Boogaloo Boys. They want to start a second American civil war and are named after the 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo".
It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of?
Jokingly referring to something as "<subject_goes_here> 2: Electric Boogaloo" was a very common turn of phrase on certain parts of the internet in the early-mid 2010s. It sounds like a joke because it grew out of a joke.
>almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did.
I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
> "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things"
I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me.
If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%.
Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us.
More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
> Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs.
> More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
The things they believe are quite possibly internally consistent and not insane at all, just so far outside the overton window of an ordinary person so as to sound insane. Rather, they are the fringes of the fringes of political ideology and in my view the prime cause of falling prey to these is social alienation.
DSM 5 already has this, called "Delusional Disorder":
A. Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
B. Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met. Note: Hallucinations, if present, are not prominent and are related to the delusion theme (e.g., the sensation of being infested with insects associated with delusions of infestation.
C. Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
“ Such ridicule typically will not occur after a religious conversion brings a previous non-conformist into the fold of the culture’s dominant religion.”
"None of you think the major religions teach some insane things? Okay then."
I was on the phone so couldn't type much, but my point is the concept of the collective cognitive imperative (much better explained in the book than in Wikipedia, to be fair) would answer your question by saying "it's not that nobody thinks that: it's that enough people accept those insane things to the point that 1) they don't think they're insane things, 2) you'd be an outsider (or even considered insane) if you point out the fact that they're insane things.
I'll try to give an example that would work in my cultural context (South America): someone making a rain dance during a drought would be considered by most to be something from harmlessly silly to crazy. Someone praying to the christian god for guidance or help would be seen as normal.
I was trying to understand what you meant by “insane”, but you already moved the goalposts to “implausible”, so it’s not clear to me that you even know what you’re claiming.
However, if I were to take a guess, it’s something like “people sometimes believe things without proof”. But obviously this is not true only of religious people, other people have their own creation stories – the sole difference is their’s don’t involve worship. And I agree they can’t all be right, but perhaps one of them is.
I didn't move the goal posts; I just used a slightly different word. No offense, but it's ridiculous (sorry, "insane") that I'm dealing with pushback on the point the point that religious believe things that would be considered insane if not labeled as "religion". "There's an all-powerful being that is behind everything... etc." If you're not willing to give any ground on that, then it's not a productive discussion in the first place.
What about the non-religious claim: “There’s not an all-powerful being that is behind everything”? Just as “indefensible”, just as “implausible”, just as “insane”. The sole difference is that it doesn’t involve worship, and therefore categorically isn’t “religious”.
These are axioms, you cannot derive them, you can only derive from them. Saying “my axioms are rational, yours are ‘insane’!” is frankly childish, and speaks to a deep lack of understanding of the essence of reason.
I think diagnosis is mostly made up jargon that doesn’t capture the complexity of the human experience. It is designed to itemize the human experience for bureaucratic consumption. Autism diagnosis gives access to school resources whereas weird child that prefers their own thoughts does not. Schizophrenia lets you lock up people with antisocial beliefs. ADHD lets you medicate away the natural hyperactivity of 7 year olds. Diagnosis is a form of societal control. This is different from modern schema therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy which focus on the individual experiences a person has such as their actions and thought patterns that allows them to disentangle themselves from patterns of behavior that harm them such as paranoid delusions, alcoholism, unhealthy sex, etc. but those things require lots of one on one work with a therapist.
> it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however
Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
I totally agree with that, meanwhile I think mnky meant that illness doesn’t necessarily remove all your judgement. You can have totally coherent thinking on a field while being incapable to reason on another. Easy exemple : Math and Empathy, where schizophrenic may excel in the former while lacking the later. Someone affected by trisomy 21 have more chances to get the opposite. <- generalization for illustration purpose, those affections are complex and schizophrenia is a spectrum anyway.
Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
Does it really count if the difference is "be removed from society for a while by being sent to prison" vs "be removed from society indefinitely by being sent to inpatient lockup"?
Paranoid delusions related to obsessive compulsive disorders or personality disorders stemming from post traumatic stress rarely seem to qualify insanity pleas except in episodes of law and order even though they can motivate highly irrational and self destructive behaviour.
Since it’s a group so wonder if a group mental illness would make sense. I guess it could work for the court “look how out of touch with reality my client is, sith vegans, clearly they didn’t know what they were doing!”
It was very cult like with Ziz cutting off members from their friends and the internet. And writing long complicated essays that didn’t make sense if you weren’t in the group.
I’m sure the court juge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name. Understanding their motivations for the murders, understanding their motivation to call themselves vegan (perhaps it’s a joke for them too, perhaps they’re really vegan) and their motivation to call themselves sith (I would bet for fun joke but it may be branding : and army of determined warriors, or mental illness if their really believe to be sith - yes human brain can to that).
It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
> I’m sure the court judge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name
Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though.
To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
What is going on: the internet is letting you know all this shit. Imagine you had a ticker feed of every story amongst the 8bn. That would be a crazy story per millisecond.
To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.
All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.
Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.
You can't reason about first principles. What first principles someone chooses as their "axioms" doesn't alter their ability to be reasonable. Materialism or empiricism are just as much a random choice for a base principle as deism or theism or many others.
A lot of the evils that the hardcore atheist crowd (Dawkins, Sam Harris, that crowd) ascribes to religion is oftentimes much better understood as imperialism and other purely political ambitions couched in what was the most common first principle of the time. The desire of European kings (including the Pope) to hold Jerusalem and later Constantinople were much better understood as a desire to control trade and expand their territory/influence rather than some deeply seated religious fervor, just for the example of the crusades. And for things like the inquisition, we can see today as well plenty of largely secular demonization and oppression of marginalized groups.
I don't think it's possible to act as a human without irrational belief, and everyone harbors them because there is no rational answer to the question "why?".
There is an immense difference between "Every human being believes things that are irrational, and is not rational" and "The very first step in nearly every major religion is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do"
It was trivial for southern baptist sermons to convince white southerners that black people being slaves was "as god wants it", and therefore should be defended with their very lives, precisely because in Christianity at least, god asks you to do pretty awful things all the time.... At least if you listen to your preacher".
Look at the religious right insisting that jesus is "woke" and that Trump should deport an american citizen because she preached peace. There's only so many words said by jesus in most bibles, not a single one about trans people, so why do they insist so ferociously that trans people are evil?
This goes double for all those "great awakening" neo-"Christian" ~cults~ religions in the US that insist that the bible is not just inerrant, but trivially understandable by even the dumbest human beings, which is just fundamentally false.
30 million american adults explicitly say that the earth was created within the past 10k years by god exactly as it is now. They believe that evolution is not just wrong, but a hoax that most of science is in on. They believe that science is a conspiracy by Satan to keep them from god's light.
People on this very forum espouse these beliefs. Just the other day someone posted Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis as a resource, despite it being an organization that spreads outright lies, and is still trying to get evolution out of schools, and they are winning.
These are the same organizations, groups, families, etc that created the Scopes Monkey trial back in 1925. Understand that they considered it a success. 100 years later and we might very well see creationism back in US schools, despite overwhelming and conclusive evidence of evolution as the means of speciation.
My point is that bad ideas, values, and ideas are not exclusive to religion, but orthogonal. I see plenty of secular lies and misinformation posted every day as well.
The very first step in nearly every human group is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do.
That goes for Republicans, communists, Nazis, or the DNC. Bullshit and unthinking conformance transgresses the boundary of secular and religious ideology.
Do you think the zizan rationalists are free from bullshit because they
Atheist? Meanwhile they claim that AI from the future will put people into torture simulations as punishment if they aren't vegan, and that the only rational thing to do is kill your landlord with a katana.
Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort.
“We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”?
What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.